


Threeway Tango

by Glinda



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: CCTV, Early in Canon, Invasion of Privacy, Multi, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 16:19:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17410175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: It’s a dance, Carter decides. That’s what she’s doing with her man in a suit. They aren't dancing alone.





	Threeway Tango

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladyjax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyjax/gifts).



> I went back to the beginning of the show for this story. I watched this show all out of order while it was airing, so I wanted to go back to the start and watch the first couple of seasons in order so I could do Joss Carter justice. So of course what you end up with is a story set very early in the show.

It’s a dance, Carter decides. That’s what she’s doing with her man in a suit. Carefully choreographed certainly, their movements heavily circumscribed, but one in which they both feel no compunction about breaking the rules if the over-all result is likely to be particularly effective or merely poetic. However frustrating the dance might be in and of itself, there is an underlying satisfaction in having a proper puzzle to get her teeth into. She’s never felt the need to be any sort of maverick – she’s watches detective shows like they’re science-fiction, the white officers she knows who can get away with abusing their privilege like that are mostly corrupt, not geniuses – she’s got to be where she is by being steadily, reliably excellent at her job. She knows exactly when to be warm, when to be cold and when to let the soldier that still lives under her skin, show through.

~

The cameras watch her every move. 

Joss had started to think she was getting paranoid, but now she knows it to be true. It creeps her out to think that there’s a pair of eyes behind all those lenses, even knowing that they’re watching out for her, watching over her. 

John doesn’t find it creepy. Somewhere along the way he’s come to find it comforting. For someone who can make himself so invisible, so completely opaque to almost any observer, it must be it’s own relief to be seen, to have someone in his life so completely unsusceptible to his deceptions and defences. 

It’s arguably what draws him to Joss herself, like a moth to a flame. She wonders what his invisible partner thinks of that; whether he draws the same conclusions about the similarities between them and the ways they bind John to them both. She wonders if he understands how John revels in being observed, being seen by them both, if letting them know he’s watching them is a passive aggressive act of possessiveness or an equally creepy way of letting them know he cares. 

She wonders what that says about the way he now watches her too. 

~

She shouldn’t be here. Officially she isn’t here at all. In fact, if anyone cared to ask, three separate people – not including her partner – could tell you that they’d seen one Detective Joss Carter entering a completely different building, in a completely part of the city. But someone tried really hard to kill her tonight. Joss has a lot of questions and a lot of doubts right now, but the one thing she knows for absolutely certain is that John saved her life. She shouldn’t trust him, yet somehow when he asks her to come with him, to let him keep her safe, just for tonight, she believes him. 

So here she is, in a penthouse apartment that is somehow both opulent and starkly minimalist. (That has a suspicious amount of cameras, and that’s just the ones she can see.) There’s music playing softly from somewhere, nothing intrusive, almost soothing, if not for the driving bass beat that seeps into her skin and makes her want to dance. Reminds her how long it’s been since she last danced properly. There’s something about the late hour, the low lights and the music, about standing there in her stocking soles with him in his shirtsleeves, having performed the necessary first aid on each other. It invites a particular kind of intimacy and informality, as though they’ve each set aside their armour and defences with their coats by the door. Joss holds her hand out to John, in a silent offer to dance, they banter gently about his limited abilities on that front, but in practice he’s very good at following her lead and the steps aren’t remotely complex. Just two bodies moving to a shared beat, spinning slowly onto a new path that once started seems almost inevitable in its destination. 

He lays her down gently, displaying her carefully to her best advantage, as though showing her off to another lover. Any other time she might find the whole situation a little unnerving, but the steady heat of slow built desire is burning through her veins and instead she feels beautiful, she feels desired. By the time he falls upon her, to worship her body with his mouth and his hands – her name on his half-whispered breath a prayer and a benediction both - she has completely forgotten about the cameras. Instead she reads the stories hidden in his scars and lets him read her own scars for their own forgotten truths. 

Tonight the cameras aren’t creepy, they’re comforting, and they tell her she’s safe and watched over. The steady blink of a little green light, like a warm sleepy gaze upon her skin. 

She sleeps.

~

When she wakes in the morning, they’re not alone. Breakfast is waiting, as is John’s mysterious partner. Impeccably dressed and sitting carefully composed on the edge of the bed behind a still-slumbering John. He’s wearing a very different persona from the last time they met, but she recognises him anyway, and it must show on her face, because he tips her a nod of acknowledgement along with a wry smile. His gaze transfers to John as he stirs slightly, moving to gently stroke his hair, soothing the other man back over the edge of slumber again. His expression is both tender and fierce when he raises his gaze to meet her own once more. This is a gift, she understands, a return of a favour. She had gone to bed with John, but this man had seen her naked too – she’d felt his absence, the spaces that John was leaving for him, she wonders now if John realises he does it – so is giving her something that to him is of equal value. For someone as pathologically private as him, allowing her to see him this point of vulnerability, this tenderness, is infinitely more intimate than if he were as naked as she is under her sheet. She wonders if he’s ever let John see that much, she hopes so, the alternative is too sad to contemplate. 

Either way, she hold his gaze unwaveringly, makes sure he sees her own nod of acknowledgement. 

“Thank you, Harold” she tells him, though she sincerely doubts that’s his real name. For the refuge last night, for the loan of someone so dear to him, for this little moment of shared intimacy this morning, for the breakfast to come. 

“Thank _you_ , Detective Carter” he demurs. She wonders what else he’s thanking her for that she knows nothing about, and how annoyed she’ll be when she finds out what they are.


End file.
